GOP to probe Obamacare glitches

Republican lawmakers are demanding answers from the White House about the technical flaws that have crippled Obamacare’s online enrollment system in its opening week.

Top House watchdog Rep. Darrell Issa and others say the troubled reality doesn’t jibe with the rosy predictions administration officials and contractors were making ahead of the Oct. 1 launch of HealthCare.gov, the online portal most of the country will use to enroll new Obamacare coverage programs.

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“Despite the widespread belief that the administration was not ready for the health law’s Oct. 1 launch, top officials and lead IT contractors looked us in the eye and assured us all systems were a go,” House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) said in a statement. “Instead, here we are 10 days later, and delays and technical failures have reached epidemic proportions.”

Republicans on Upton’s Committee on Thursday called on CGI and QSSI — the contractors in charge of building the federal enrollment system on HealthCare.gov and the data hub responsible for testing subsidy eligibility, respectively — to square their late-summer assessments with the reality that technical flaws have been hampering the rollout of new Obamacare coverage programs.

Committee Republicans are seeking a briefing with the contractors and staff of the Department of Health and Human Services by next week, and they’re asking HHS to provide a more detailed accounting of what’s gone wrong with the federal enrollment process so far. HealthCare.gov is the portal for residents in the 36 states that have deferred to the federal exchange to access subsidized private health plans, a centerpiece of Obamacare’s coverage expansion. Many of the 14 states that have built their own exchanges, along with the District of Columbia, have reported fewer technical problems, and a number of those have been ironed out.

In a separate letter Thursday to HHS, Issa and Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) asked whether people who have encountered technical flaws in Obamacare’s enrollment system will still be subject to penalties if they fail to get health insurance.

The pair demanded answers to a series of technical questions by Oct. 24, including descriptions of the problems plaguing the federal exchange system, the number of successful enrollments as of Oct. 9 and details about the testing of the exchange system prior to its Oct. 1 launch.

The Obama administration has offered little insight into the root problems leading to the HealthCare.gov breakdowns, attributing the glitches to a high volume of Web traffic and intense interest in signing up for coverage. Officials have also promised that the site is improving daily as they’ve added server capacity and corrected “hardware and software” problems.